Synopsis.
Andrea is a high school student at the classical lyceum. During a literature class focused on Pascoli’s poem La Tovaglia, a Black woman from the roof adjacent to the classroom threatens to kill herself in a hysterical crisis. Amidst the general panic, Andrea breaks away from the class and, by chance, meets the troubled gaze of Giulia (Maruschka Detmers), instantly losing his head for this unstable girl who is the partner of a former terrorist. From that moment, a whirlwind of dizzying situations unfolds between the two: they chase each other, seek each other out, love each other intensely. The school, which witnesses the initial attempted suicide as if it were a spectacle, becomes the place of passivity, of conditioning. Against this backdrop, Andrea and Giulia are two bodies seeking each other out to break free from the cage, to invent a relationship that is not already written, already foreseen, already judged.
Their psychological traits are very different: Andrea is on the verge of a breaking point with his psychiatrist father and, more generally, with his entire system—school, family, and interpersonal relationships—and is determined to forge his own independence. Giulia, played by a fantastic Maruschka Detmers (who had just finished shooting with Godard on Prénom Carmen), is locked into a bourgeois framework seemingly without escape: her jurist father murdered by the BR; her fiancé, a former terrorist now repented; the invasive figure of her fiancé’s mother, who pushes for a marriage that would benefit her son legally; and the comforting shadow of a luxurious home into which she can retreat. After the initial rooftop scene following the lesson on Pascoli—a kind of premonition of an unexpected tornado in the lives of both characters—Andrea and Giulia embark on a path akin to a psychiatric treatise that will tip over into psychosis.
The Book
Bellocchio’s reference to Raymond Radiguet’s text is only primordial and limited to the genesis of the two characters; the film then develops in completely different eras, contexts, and even themes, although Bellocchio no doubt draws on and reinterprets in his own time the strong spirit of independence and rupture contained within the novel.
Jean Cocteau, one of Radiguet’s greatest admirers—Radiguet died at only 20, two years after the novel was published—describes the young writer as myopic and wild, taciturn to the point of rudeness, and with hopelessly wrong hair. His esteem was immense: he was—Cet élève qui devint mon maître, he possessed the golden quality that Cocteau prized most, non somigliare a nulla. That innate ability to instill free and deeply personal imagination into literary text. The novel tells the story of a secret love affair between a teenager and a married woman during World War I. Set against this historical backdrop marked by war, it explores themes of youthful passion, lost innocence, and the social consequences of forbidden love, with a unique and distinctive style focused on the relationship between the two lovers, while the war and society appear only as a blurred backdrop. In addition to its explicit sensuality, evident from the very first page, the novel scandalized readers because, just after the war—while the dead were still being counted—it depicted those years as a series of “uninterrupted holidays” for the very young, a strange period in which the narrator is struck by the “poetry of things.”
If the complex machinery of a masterpiece often works in a harmonious yet invisible manner, in Radiguet’s novel he manages to pull the threads of the plot with extraordinary delicacy, and his narrative “I” permeates the work entirely, remaining nameless throughout, almost as if aspiring to embody an Idea.
Bellocchio, inspired by psychiatrist Massimo Fagioli, with whom he had formed a strong, unexpected, and artistic collaboration in those years, tries in his film—even though it is set in a different era and with different characters—to capture some of those invisible mechanisms that underpin masterpieces and Radiguet’s text, populating his cinematic field with images that remain impressed like luminous wounds.
Il Diavolo in Corpo – Marco Bellocchio – 1986
The film is set in 1980s Italy, in the midst of the post-terrorist era. Giulia's father was killed by the Red Brigades, and her fiancé is a political terrorist in prison. This political backdrop is never explicitly analyzed, yet it permeates every scene and gesture; the bourgeoisie is portrayed as a world in a state of irreversible decomposition, unable to process grief, but more importantly, incapable of handling desire, the director notes. Andrea's father, a psychoanalyst, has treated Giulia, and represents the scientific authority who pathologizes both love and rebellion without hesitation or nuance. He, too, was likely seduced by Giulia in the past, and now, with her new relationship with his son, he sets himself up in opposition; Giulia is the disruptive element in his apparatus/protocol, the ambiguous authority incapable of understanding the vitality of desire. The terrorist’s mother, instead, embodies social opportunism, marriage as an instrument of liberation, even if only symbolically.
Bellocchio, always interested in the dialectic between the individual and institutions, here constructs a work in which the psyche becomes harshness, minaret, and battleground. Desire here is not only erotic but political: it is what defies rules, breaks balances, refuses adaptation. In this sense, the film is dedicated to Massimo Fagioli, an “irregular” psychiatrist whose theories profoundly influenced Bellocchio, leading him to reject Freudian psychoanalysis in favor of a more radical and anthropological vision of the mind.
Desire here does not rest in the private or sentimental sphere; it is equally distant from any directorial approach that speculates on desire. Instead, here it is a contrarian force, one that opposes and disrupts. Bellocchio stages a silent cold war between the individual and the structures seeking to standardize him: the family, school, medicine, justice, even historical memory—these are all present in the film as control apparatuses, devices that attempt to classify identity, to make it functional, predictable, adaptable.
In this context, the psyche becomes the true battlefield. Andrea, the young protagonist, is not just a lovesick teenager: he is a subject in formation, an identity evolving through disobedience; his desire for Giulia is not only erotic, but epistemic: it is the means by which he discovers himself, the means by which he extricates himself from his psychoanalyst father’s logic, school pedagogy, and bourgeois morality. Giulia, for her part, is a liminal figure, suspended between trauma and liberation. She has lost her father to terrorism, is involved with a political prisoner, has been “treated” by Andrea’s father. Her body is the place where history and clinic, grief and impulse intersect. Giulia is the locus where the war between eros and norm, desire and repression is waged. Her body is exposed, vulnerable, but also powerful: it is the body that calls, but also the one that resists. Bellocchio goes far beyond the carnal representation that much local criticism has attached to him; Detmers’ body and form are the focal point of his theater of war. Desire, psyche, bourgeoisie, medicine, politics: all are at stake, all are called into question; the film offers no answers, but opens wounds. And in those wounds, perhaps lies the possibility for a new subjectivity that does not simply adapt, but creates something new from the ashes, from decomposition.
In a desire for synthesis, which could also be likened to a forced bottleneck, and considering all the impulses at play, Bellocchio’s film could be seen as a chaos of situations and events that strike and gradually break apart that social fabric, viewed from above, from those rooftops so often visited by Andrea and Giulia. Reminding us that what is infinite can only be the product of invisible and divine entities, thus defining the “logos-battlefield” with these two boundaries.
The opening rooftop scene: Bellocchio uses Pascoli’s poem in the opening scene, during a school lesson. The teacher recites Pascoli’s La Tovaglia, but the class is distracted. Only Andrea listens. And this is crucial.
Giulia, the protagonist, has been marked by the death of her brother, a political activist. The poem becomes a metaphor for her pain: she “leaves the cloth out,” meaning she does not close with the past. The dead return, not as ghosts, but as thoughts, as open wounds.
Andrea is the only student who grasps the deep meaning of the poem. This signifies that he is different, more sensitive, more open to mystery. It is his first contact with the adult world, with death, with love. The lesson is his existential baptism.
The final graduation exam scene is one of the most emblematic moments, and Bellocchio stages it with an almost metaphysical tension. Andrea, seated before the panel, does not answer as expected: he does not recite, does not please, does not conform. His words are visionary, philosophical, disarming. The teacher asks Andrea to speak about contingency and necessity, concepts central to metaphysical thought.
Andrea does not just define. He speaks of contingency as that which does not derive from necessity, but which happens, which breaks in. He uses metaphors, distancing himself from scholastic language.
“Contingency is what is not foreseen, what breaks logic. It is like a breath that enters and changes everything.”
Bellocchio, through Andrea, suggests that true knowledge is not repetition, but intuition. Andrea does not answer to obtain a grade: he answers to reveal himself. Then comes a passage from Sophocles’ Antigone. Andrea is asked to translate and comment on the conflict between human laws and divine laws.
Andrea translates, but then goes beyond. He speaks of Antigone as a figure who does not accept the imposed law, who follows an inner truth.
“Antigone is not against the law: she is beyond. She is faithful to something that cannot be written.”
Here Andrea identifies with Antigone: both are disobedient, faithful to an inner voice.
Bellocchio shows us that Andrea is an initiate, a young man who has already crossed the fire.
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